Brendan Caldwell

When the historians of the future cast their cyber-eyes over the deluge of stupidity we encrusted upon the primitive internet, they will see that our fables, our moral storytelling, was mostly conducted with flashing colours and double-jumps. Yes, videogames have adopted the moralistic finger-wagging of fairytales and Victorian novels, for better or for worse. They have taught us a lot about ourselves and our place…

Tagged with feature, One Off The List, Brothers: A Tale Of Two Sons, DayZ, Dicey Dungeons, EVE Online, Heat Signature, Hitman, Hitman 2, King of Dragon Pass, Pathologic 2, Return of the Obra Dinn, Rome: Total War, Space Engineers, Subnautica, The Yawhg.

Everyone’s a cook now, is that it? A few weeks in lockdown and you’re all suddenly artisan bakers and Bon Appétit Kitchen presenters? Sorry, I don’t buy it. Put the chickpeas down, Jeff. We all know what happens when you let things “simmer”. However, there is a world in which your cooking really does impress. Where it comes out of the pot scrumptious and hot…

Tagged with feature, One Off The List, Fallout 4, Final Fantasy XV, Half-Life: Alyx, Minecraft, Monster Hunter: World, Overcooked, Stardew Valley, Temtem, Yakuza 0.

Let us wish a blessed Good Friday to all the Catholics in the house. Now, get out. Your fish-sharing magician cannot compete with these 9 videogame characters who see death as nothing but a passing nuisance. These 9 heroes of reanimated flesh. These 9 unkillable beings of limitless power and mystery. Where is your precious Holy Spirit now, loser? Look at these 9 luminous freaks…

Tagged with blasphemy, feature, One Off The List, EVE Online, Hitman 2, metal gear solid, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, Resident Evil 2, Resident Evil 7 Biohazard, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Sonic the Hedgehog, The Swapper.

The human race evolved the facial expression known as the “smile” because we needed a way to silently communicate satisfaction to other members of our species. So we decided to bare our teeth at one another and squint. This stuck, and now even the characters of your favourite digital storyderby are doing it. It’s sort of disgusting, and yet… you know what, I like it.…

Tagged with feature, One Off The List, Apex Legends, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Dark Souls: Remastered, Heaven's Vault, Mass Effect Andromeda, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, Resident Evil 3, Street Fighter V, Team Fortress 2, Undertale, Wilmot's Warehouse.

I met Arwa during a siege. She was a spearwoman of the Aserai. A fighty southerner who had been taken prisoner on four separate occasions, but still loved to go to war. She made me feel dizzy, a real knock-out. Or maybe that was the Imperial mace that cracked me across the skull. It's hard to say what mystery ailments arise from love, when you're…

Tagged with Diary, feature, love and marriage, TaleWorlds, Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord.

An obscenely rich teenager throws his VR controller across the room in a fit of blind panic while playing Half-Life: Alyx. It leaves the window of his bedroom at 5m/s. It falls 10m vertically and hits his neighbour’s greenhouse, smashing the glass. How many metres did the controller travel horizontally before coming to a stop in the tomatoes? Use a kinematic formula to determine your…

Tagged with feature, One Off The List, Besiege, crayon-physics-deluxe, Grand Theft Auto V, Half-Life: Alyx, Human Fall Flat, Just Cause 4, Kerbal Space Program, Line Rider, Portal, Session, Totally Accurate Battle Simulator.

“Hell is other people,” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre. “But also my favourite level in Doom.” He was a smart man, and he probably lives in hell now, on account of all the atheism. But listen, hell doesn’t seem that bad. Bit hot. Bit demonic. You could do a lot worse than a trip to the underworld, is what I’m saying, and as luck would have it,…

Tagged with feature, One Off The List, Afterparty, Diablo II, Diablo III, Doom, Doom Eternal, Getting Over It, Grim Fandango, Hades, Minecraft, Seum: Speedrunners from Hell, Spelunky.

It’s Friday the 13th, the day of Saint Badluck, patron saint of ladders and casinos. And it is a fabulous holiday. Out there, parades are getting ready to be rained on, and children are looking forward to tonight’s shenanigans, when they will dress up as mirrors and knock on doors, declaring: “sweets or I’ll smash myself”. I love Friday the 13th. So many cherished memories.…

Tagged with feature, One Off The List, Dicey Dungeons, Hitman 2, Life Is Strange 2, Portal 2, Return of the Obra Dinn, Spelunky, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, The Stanley Parable, XCOM 2.

If it's not baroque, don't fix it. Little architecture joke for you there, just to kick off a dry topic with a giggle. You see, appreciating architecture is for people in beige cardigans. Folks who subscribe to magazines printed on paper so thick you can still calculate the tree’s age. You know the type I mean. Spectacled couples with non-Ikea coffee tables. Thirty-year-olds. People like…

Tagged with feature, One Off The List, Assassin's Creed Origins, BioShock, Control, Dark Souls 3, Dishonored 2, Elite Dangerous, Infra, Outer Wilds, Resident Evil 7 Biohazard, What Remains of Edith Finch.

Ah, religion. I know this is a topic we all have trouble agreeing on. But fear not, humble practitioner of a good pray, I am not here to squint angrily at your favourite book of life advice. I’m only here for the videogame religions. The ones that are very, very, very, very bad. You know, the gun-loving cults and the xenophobic people-burners. The (mostly) fictional…

Tagged with feature, One Off The List, Assassin's Creed Brotherhood, Assassin's Creed II, Divinity: Original Sin 2, Dragon Age: Origins, Far Cry 5, Final Fantasy X, Metro Exodus, Pyre, Slay the Spire, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

The greasy realm of the videogame is not always the best place to look for good writing. For every Disco Elysium there are roughly 800 Detroit: Beyond Humans. But it is a good place to look for wondrous, over-the-top nonsense. I’m talking about character dialogue so flamboyant and exaggerated, you could insert some line breaks and it would instantly become a verse in a glam…

Tagged with feature, One Off The List, Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown, Apex Legends, Blasphemous, Darkest Dungeon, Everything, Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition, Mass Effect 2, Max Payne 2: The Fall Of Max Payne, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, Resident Evil 2, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Yakuza Kiwami 2.

Happy love day, you disgusting piece of filth. Got you. That was an example of what today’s young people call “neggling”. This is when you are nice and nasty in such quick succession that the body becomes inexplicably aroused. Spasms of lust take over both neggler and negglee, resulting in a paroxysm of extramarital sex and, subsequently, the degeneration of humanity. This is just one…

Tagged with feature, One Off The List, Astrologaster, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Mass Effect 2, Mass Effect 3, Mortal Kombat 11, Octodad: Dadliest Catch, Overwatch, Tekken 7, The Wolf Among Us, Transistor.

Imagine a world without electricity. Horrible. What would we use to blend our smoothies? How would we know when uncle Derek hits the metal bit again in the Sunday game of Operation? Electricity has roughly one dozen uses, and yet it is in the realm of videogames when we see its most fantastical and offensive capabilities brought screaming to life. To celebrate the important role…

Tagged with feature, One Off The List, Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown, Dark Souls 3, Dead Rising 4, Hitman, Overwatch, Oxygen Not Included, Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, Yakuza 0.

Children, life’s great copy-paste. Adorable, drooling idiots with no self-control and a habit of yelling embarrassing facts to the entire supermarket. In our everyday lives, human children are a snotty emblem of hope, vulnerability, and aspiration. In videogames, they are a cursed harbinger of escort missions, narrative roadblocks, “cutesy” voice acting, and precocious dialogue. They are annoying. But hold on, that’s the point. Many of…

Tagged with feature, One Off The List, Crusader Kings II, Disco Elysium, Fallout 3, Final Fantasy XIII, Heavy Rain, Mass Effect 3, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, Pathologic 2, Psychonauts.

Put the 9mm down, for crying out loud. Not every game is about shooting your enemies in the shin bones. Honestly. Give me that, here, take this trowel. Now, follow me, through this tranquil landscape of blooming daffodils and perfectly arranged stone paths covered in happy moss. Yes, that’s it, you want a turn around the garden. A bit of soil on your fingers. And…

Tagged with feature, One Off The List, Eastshade, Everybody's Gone To The Rapture, Mutazione, Quiet as a Stone, Stardew Valley, The Sims 4, The Talos Principle, Untitled Goose Game.

Here we stand in the dark neo-year of 2020. The spam bots have risen to prominence, the governments of the world are bickering over follower counts, and history class has been renamed "meme studies". Somewhere, in a dusty room in the RPS treehouse, a rogue human is compiling a list article for a crumbling PC games website. It is a warning to all those who…

Tagged with feature, One Off The List, BattleTech, Deus Ex, Mass Effect 3, NieR: Automata, RimWorld, Shadowrun Returns, SOMA, Stellaris, Universe Sandbox.

I have spent the winter holidays making a list, checking it twice, trying to find who is naughty on ice. But unlike the popular red-clad demon of the north, my list is reserved for terrors, demons and critters larger than 4 feet tall. I’m talking about cold monsters. They’re very chic this week. You see, while Nic has been battering majestic species of endangered giganto-moose…

Tagged with cold to the touch and it isn't very nice, feature, One Off The List, Alien: Isolation, BioShock, Dark Souls 3, Her Story, Monster Hunter: World, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Subnautica: Below Zero, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

And with that we are another year closer to the eagerly anticipated cooling of all matter. You may have read that the concept of weeks, months and years is the culmination of humanity’s collective understanding of a complicated astronomical pattern. It's an interesting take. However, the correct hypothesis was posited by your stoner housemate Jed from university. “Time is, like, a construct,” he said, with…

Tagged with feature, One Off The List, Command & Conquer: Red Alert, Day Of The Tentacle Remastered, Final Fantasy VIII Remastered, Life Is Strange, Outer Wilds, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Titanfall 2, Titanic: Adventure Out Of Time.

There are only five days left to furtively flick through your cousin’s Facebook page in a desperate attempt to understand them as a person. But you do know one thing: they love to play those videogames. That’s enough to go on, surely. You can just type “gamer gifts” into the cybervoid and see what comes out! No. Do not do that. Here are the 8…

Tagged with feature, One Off The List, Batman: Arkham Asylum, BioShock, Dead Island: Riptide, Death Stranding, Destiny 2, Far Cry 5, Fortnite, Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII.

Mech love, not war. That is the lesson we must learn from the futuristic prophecies of the MechWarrior games. Yes, it is very noble to slam your big steel shoes upon a separatist’s bedroom, and to laser him in the head. But would it not bring greater valour, greater unity, greater enlightenment, if those same 65-ton brogues were used … to dance! No. Here is…

Tagged with feature, One Off The List, BattleTech, Final Fantasy VI, Into the Breach, MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, SOMA, Subnautica, The Surge 2, Titanfall 2, XCOM: Enemy Within.